battery fire

Lithium technology really isn't up to the job. Someone needs to come up with a quantum leap forward in batteries. A fortune awaits the person or team which can deliver on this. And I mean a *fortune*.

Storing electricity is tough. And inefficient.

It's funny how 'quantum leap' has come to be taken for a huge change, although it originally really meant the tiniest possible change.

High energy density batteries will always be dangerous. It's the inevitable consequence of storing a lot of energy in a small package. A tank full of fuel is really much safer. What we really need is an efficient flow battery, where reactive components are kept apart until needed.

Jeroen Belleman

It’s not the size of the change that’s in view, but rather its discontinuous character.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

On 17/01/2025 15:03, john larkin wrote: >

It will be. I'm presently fighting a bunch of cowboys with no track record at all trying to obtain planning consent to install a 1GW / 4GWhr BESS on my doorstep (that is bigger than the entire of Moss Landing). They have all the best consultants in the business working for them.

This big fire should really get the planners attention. Most helpful.

Despite it being a globally significant infrastructure project 20x bigger than the largest that is operational here in the UK it is a county council planning decision! Our government are clueless (as was the previous Tory administration).

Pumped storage is OK. Batteries will have to play their part but they need to be properly engineered and installed in the right places. Energy dense materials can be very dangerous if mishandled.

Lithium ion battery fires are virtually impossible to put out - you have to let them burn out and use boundary cooling on the neighbouring modules with copious amounts of water. Looks like this one managed to get away from the fire fighters (which isn't supposed to happen).

The ones near me will be hung onto two of the most overloaded N-S supergrid lines in the UK and so effectively useless at times of peak need. Buffering should always be either at source or close to point of use so that network infrastructure can be used to full capacity.

I hope the wind direction doesn't change.

Many thanks for the heads up about this one!

Natural gas is great stuff. Burns clean with half the CO2 of coal.

It's easy to store locally, and the pipelines store more. And there's gobs underground and people keep finding more.

Small-scale NG power plants are practical and reliable and elimniate gigantic transmission lines and battery banks.

But 2:1 isn't acceptable to greenies. Let them freeze in the dark unemployed for a while and maybe they will reconsider.

The problem is we're *all* being expected to freeze in the dark just to humor their delusions about "greenhouse gases" (the world's most expensive hoax so far, dwarfing even Pearl Habour).

I fail to understand why battery storage facilities must be huge. They really should be distributed, and there doesn't seem to be a good reason as to why they aren't.

Jeroen Belleman

Sigh. Indeed.

Jeroen Belleman

I know there are others but ESS Inc. has some pilot installations of their iron flow battery technology already installed and is working hard to scale up. The solvent is salt water so not much of a fire hazard :-). They are aimed at energy storage for up to 12 hours, compared to 4 hours for li-ion for best economics.

It's unacceptable for the planet. We really do have to get our CO2 emissions down further than we can get by just switching from coal to natural gas. John Larkin's preferred informant - climate change denial propaganda - doesn't mention this, so he's unaware of it.

There's no necessity for that. Solar and wind power backed up by battery storage are perfectly capable of powering an advanced industrial economy. Getting there means investing a lot of capital, but not as much as you'd need to invest in keeping to keep the coal- and oil-fired economy running. It's a no-brainer, but if you've out-sourced your thinking to fossil carbon extraction industry you won't be aware of it.

Cursitor Doom does like his lies to fatuously absurd. His "evidence" that anthropogenic global warming isn't real depends on assuming that

Australia has about 30% penetration on roof-top solar.

You need internet access to let them do that, but almost everybody has that.

We have no problem building large windmills at sea. Why not build the lithium storage facilities off the coast too? The capital cost would be higher, but once built they could be maintained in a similar way to those on land. And if one caught fire, there's plenty of water around to put the fire out, or at least keep it under control. For even greater safety - and expense - they could be built as submerged facilities, where any fire could be dealt with in seconds by opening a valve and letting sea water flood the building.

It can become a chlorine hazard if it gets mixed up with other chemicals. Ask any sub-mariner.

I seem to remember from my chemistry lessons that lithium reacts violently with water. Containing lithium pollution of large areas of the sea in stormy conditions (which is when catastrophic failure is most likely to occur) might be quite difficult.

Lithium metal reacts vigorously with water, although much less so than metallic sodium or potassium. But there is basically /no/ lithium metal in the batteries - note the name is lithium *ion* battery.

There are quite a few different Li-ion battery chemistries (see

I think that any pollution problem would also be due to the organic solvent and other materials rather than the lithium. The main issue at present seems to be toxic gas emission from the burning batteries. Perhaps dousing the fire with sea water would give the lesser of two pollution evils, but until tested we won't know.

If a conainer on a barge catches fire, toss it into the ocean.

But a barge would make battery storage even less economical.

Hey, use Google Earth to look at Orinda CA. It looks like the next Paradise, a maze of death traps.

I keep getting reminded of that old Eagles song The Last Resort and the part at the end: "you call some place Paradise - kiss it goodbye."